Voices from the Uplands
The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales
A study of family, community and rural Welsh life.
Centred on the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin, and the wider upland communities of Montgomeryshire, this book brings together long-running archival and genealogical research, oral testimony and close engagement with the landscape. It examines farming, kinship, Nonconformity, education, migration, language, cultural memory and the changes that reshaped rural society across successive generations.
Why I wrote this book
Voices from the Uplands grew from research that began as family history and gradually became something much broader. My early work on the Davies family was concerned with recovering names, relationships, farms and documentary traces that might otherwise be lost. Returning to the material years later, I became increasingly interested in what those lives could tell us about the society around them.
The result is not simply a genealogy of one family. I wanted to place individual lives back into the world that shaped them: upland farming, chapel culture, tenancy, education, migration, language, kinship and the gradual weakening of forms of community that had once given rural life much of its structure. The Davies family provides the thread, but the larger subject is the social world of rural Wales.
Where the research began
The book has roots in research stretching back to the late 1990s and in the earlier studies The Davies Caeadda Family and Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families. Those books preserved a large documentary foundation. Voices from the Uplands returned to that foundation with a different purpose: to ask historical questions about family, community, belief, work and cultural change rather than simply to reconstruct descent.
The volume also benefits from family memory and oral testimony, and includes a Foreword by Elinor Bennett OBE, whose own connection to the Caeadda family gives the opening of the book an additional personal perspective.
Sources and method
The research draws on census returns, civil registration, parish and chapel records, newspapers, wills, family papers, photographs, maps and oral testimony. Genealogical reconstruction remains important, but it is used as the framework for a wider social history. Wherever the documentary record becomes uncertain, I try to distinguish what can be established from what can only reasonably be inferred.
How it fits into my wider work
This is the book that most clearly marks the transition in my work from genealogical preservation to social history. Many of the concerns that recur elsewhere in my writing are present here: the recovery of overlooked lives, the importance of institutions and belief, the relationship between family and place, and the question of what is lost when a community’s social structures disappear.
Publication details
- Author: Antony David Davies
- Foreword: Elinor Bennett OBE
- Published: December 2025
- Formats: Kindle, paperback and hardcover
For the wider research context, see Welsh Rural History and Research Methods.
Read Voices from the Uplands
If this account of the research and the rural world behind it interests you, the complete book is available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover editions.